


broken legs but I chase perfection

by orphan_account



Category: Shadowhunters (TV)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Pre-Canon, Trichotillomania
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-25
Updated: 2019-10-25
Packaged: 2021-01-02 18:17:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,219
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21166040
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Izzy sits on her bed and stares at the evidence of her “habit.”She doesn’t know how to stop.





	broken legs but I chase perfection

“Get your hands out of your hair, Isabelle,” Maryse says.

Her voice is carefully neutral, pitched low so as to escape the notice of their guests, but Izzy is accustomed to reading the minute changes in her mother’s expression. The concern in the pinch of Maryse’s brow as she scans the room; the frustration in the clench of her jaw. She’s given this instruction many times before, and it’s never been followed.

Izzy stills, realizing that her fingers are once again twisted around the ends of her hair. It leaves them with impressions of curls, though her hair is naturally straight. It does not match the rest of her pristine appearance.

She pulls her hand down to her side, wincing a bit. A few silky black strands fall to the floor, stark against the white carpet. She tries to brush them under a cabinet with her shoe; it doesn’t work too well, and one of them sticks to the rubber sole. Maryse, still standing beside her, watches this action grimly, then grabs Izzy by the wrist and pulls her into the next room. There are no guests in here, just two guilty-looking teenage boys with a set of cards laid out between them.

“Oh, for the Angel’s sake, not _you too,_” Maryse hisses. “Can none of you behave tonight? This is a very important occasion in celebration of an esteemed Clave member. Do you find that difficult to understand, or do you just not care?”

Jace and Alec scramble to pick up the cards, mumbling apologies, while Maryse pulls a hairbrush out of her purse.

“Why did you bring a brush?” Izzy asks.

“Because,” Maryse bites out, attacking her daughter’s hair with it, “This seems to have become a recurring habit with you.”

“I’m not doing it on purpose,” Izzy says, gritting her teeth at the sparks of pain on her scalp.

“Eleven years old. _Eleven,_ Isabelle. You aren’t a child. You are more than capable of controlling your habits.”

“What’s she doing?” Jace asks, watching with interest. Alec whacks him in the shoulder, still picking up cards flung to the sides of the room and under furniture. There seem to be more cards than is usual for a single deck, as well as suits Izzy has never seen before. And – a pair of dice? How would dice be used in a card game, and – Izzy loses her train of thought when Maryse straightens a particularly nasty knot.

“Ow,” she yelps, rubbing her head and glaring balefully.

“What she’s doing is none of your business. Go find Robert,” Maryse tells Jace. “Leave those, Alec. I’ll pick them up; it doesn’t seem that I can trust you to do anything properly.”

Alec flinches, but Maryse doesn’t give him a second glance as he leaves the room, his shoulders slumped. Jace scowls, and Izzy sees him deliberately spill the cards Alec gathered before he races after his brother.

“You’re losing hair,” Maryse says, finally putting away the brush. “It used to be so thick and lovely.”

“It’s still pretty!” Izzy protests. “And it grows back fast.”

“It won’t if you keep pulling it out, people will think there’s something wrong with you.”

“I’m not—”

“Enough, Isabelle.”

Izzy stands there silently, forlorn, trying to think of something to say. Her mind, unhelpfully, remains blank.

“What was that noise?” Alec asks.

They’re in Jace’s room, all three of them practicing drawing their runes – on paper rather than skin, this time, because Maryse said they were going to leave themselves with severe scarring if they practiced for as long as it would take for their strokes to get any better. Izzy wishes they were practicing on skin anyway. At least then, both of her arms would be occupied.

“I didn’t hear anything,” she says, shoving her left hand into her pocket and repeating the rune for agility with her right. Her pencil slips and scratches across the page. She scowls and tries to erase it, but the eraser just leaves gray marks.

Jace looks up from his own paper. He’s just doodling cartoons, no runes in sight. “Nah, I heard it too.”

“I didn’t hear anything,” Izzy insists, and the conversation drops off again because really, how interesting is one noise when you live in a place like the Institute?

A few minutes later, there’s another tiny noise. Like a thread snapping.

Alec stops short, tilting his head. “Okay, I definitely heard something. Jace, did you—?”

Izzy yanks her hand down from where it’s climbed into her hair again, but she’s not fast enough.

“By the Angel, that’s _disgusting,_” Jace exclaims, jumping up and gesturing at the tangle of distinct long black hair next to where Izzy lays on the floor. “There’s no way I’m picking that up – what the hell, Izzy?”

“I’m just – I’m just – there was a knot in my hair I couldn’t get untied, and I didn’t want to go get scissors, so I just – twisted it around and snapped it off,” she lies, squirming uncomfortably. She’s well aware that it doesn’t sound in the least plausible. She’s always been a terrible liar.

“Knots in fifty freakin’ hairs?” Jace says, grimacing. “I doubt it. Ew. Not cool, man.”

“I didn’t – I’ll clean it up,” she says miserably.

She gathers up the hairs and dumps them in the trash, trying to ignore the funny looks her brothers keep giving her, and then leaves, making some stupid excuse about having a question for Hodge. She goes back to her room instead, and stares in the mirror. And stares and stares some more, from every angle, running her hands through her hair and lifting different sections. More hairs fall. Her whole room is scattered with them.

She isn’t sure when twisting her hair turned into snapping it off.

_Crazy people do that,_ she thinks. No, not quite. Crazy people _pull_ their hair, right? She’s not pulling it. Not exactly. She’s just snapping it off a few inches from her scalp. It doesn’t matter; the result is horrifying either way. Most of her hair is still long and pretty, but on the top of her head it’s clearly shorter, frizzy and dull. It’s not long enough to pull back into a ponytail and hide. She isn’t sure how Maryse hasn’t noticed it already, but then again, Maryse thinks that Izzy stopped all of this long ago and so she probably has quit paying attention.

Izzy sits on her bed and stares at the evidence of her “habit.”

She doesn’t know how to stop.

Maryse does notice it eventually, of course, and – well, Izzy tries to not think about the conversation that follows, but she’s never felt so ashamed before. Never felt like such a disappointment. So she doesn’t protest when Maryse immediately drags her to a hairdresser and gets her the shortest haircut she’s ever had, nearly shaved. What beautiful hair she had left is now gone. It will be a very long time before it’s back, no matter how fast her hair grows.

When the appointment is over, Maryse pulls her aside and says sharply, “Don’t you ever pull this crap again. It is an embarrassment to our family. Are we clear?”

Izzy swallows.

She’s been nearly in tears for the last few hours, ever since her mother found out – her mother, the person who should have supported Izzy no matter what. She feels uglier than she ever has; naked, plain. She’s always had long hair. Her neck feels weirdly cold.

“Crystal clear,” she says.

She hates it, but the short hair does help. At least until a month or two later, when it starts getting long enough again for her fingers to get a hold, twist around, and snap. There’s a certain method to it. She doesn’t like the pain if it tugs directly on her scalp, but if she wraps it around her finger, the same way you would snap a stray thread on your clothing, it doesn’t hurt. She does it subconsciously, never notices until she sees the results by her feet.

Alec and Jace surely notice, but Maryse must have said something to them, because they don’t mention it anymore.

“I think I like my hair better at this length, can I get it cut again?” Izzy asks her mother when her hair’s starting to look ragged and uneven again, at least to her.

Maryse looks her over critically. “You’re not doing _it_ again, are you?” There’s no need to ask what _it_ is.

Izzy shrugs. “Of course not, I just. . . . prefer it like this. Better for training.”

Maryse smiles, satisfied, and takes her back to the same hairdresser.

Izzy stops looking in the mirror in the mornings. Her hair is short enough that it looks no different if she fancies it up, anyway.

Izzy keeps her hair short for the next few years, and the snapping mostly stops. She almost forgets about it entirely. She’s sixteen and she’s got better things to worry about. So, _so_ many better things to worry about. Her training grows more intense by the day, Jace is more reckless than ever, Alec is withdrawn, and her parents are gone so often that Izzy hasn’t the slightest idea where she stands with them. Hodge is also acting weird, but then again he always acts weird.

Izzy’s generally stressed beyond all belief, and it’s on one of those incredibly stressful days that have become normal that _it_ starts up again, only it’s not quite the same as before. It’s worse.

She’s at her desk, reading through some dusty old book Hodge assigned her. It’s confusing as hell, but necessary, and she knows she’ll be quizzed on it in the morning. Her hands keep wandering upwards, but they never stray so far as her scalp so she doesn’t give it too much thought; she really has almost broken the habit. Her fingers wander over her eyebrows, instead, smoothing them repeatedly, prodding at the thicker hairs.

She finds one between her eyebrows – a mostly smooth space, because she’s been plucking it with tweezers for a while. Unfortunately, it seems that once she hit puberty, she inherited the family unibrow, so Maryse showed her how to deal with that fairly quickly.

It’s not that big of a deal, but it’s annoying that Izzy missed this particular hair. She’ll be the first to say she’s a bit of a perfectionist, and she doesn’t want to leave it in case she forgets about it later.

She’s deep in the textbook, and she’s not even sure where she put her tweezers last, so she just grips the hair between her nails and tugs it out. Simple as that.

Her eyes water a bit, because damn, that hurt a lot more than snapping a hair off her scalp, and her nails dug into her skin a bit, but it’s fine.

She keeps finding more stray hairs like that, ones that are in the wrong spot, or angled wrong, or a different texture than the others, and by the time she finishes the book at three a.m., her brow aches and stings and her fingers are cramped. She doesn’t care much, though, until she notices the blood under her fingernails. Then she rushes to the bathroom and – she stops short, staring in horror at her reflection. At the incredibly obvious, repulsive bloody bare skin on her brows. Few hairs remain at all, though they’re a bit thicker towards the ends.

She has no idea how to hide this.

And that, of course, is when there’s a knock on the door. A very insistent knock that could be an emergency, so there’s nothing for Izzy to do but open it, despite her current state.

Maryse’s eyes widen. “What did you _do_—” she chokes out.

Izzy scrambles for words. An explanation, no matter how false it sounds – anything.

“I just – I just wanted to shape them, I’ve seen the other girls do it,” she mumbles. “I wasn’t paying attention, I made one uneven and I made the other match, and then I did too much. I’m sorry, I really didn’t mean to. I know it looks bad.”

She’s gotten better at lying over the years, but Maryse is perceptive. Or she would be, if she wasn’t standing there, staring at her daughter in absolute stunned disbelief.

Then Maryse’s shock turns to anger. “Yes, and those other girls are idiots! Sometimes their eyebrows never grow back! And – and – I can’t believe you. All of the things you have to focus on, and you wanted to follow a _fad._”

_No, I didn’t,_ Izzy thinks. _But would it be so wrong if I did? Why are you so judgmental?_

It’s not the first time she questions what her mother is saying, and it won’t be the last.

Izzy’s no good at using makeup to draw on her eyebrows, but it at least hides her red, scarred skin and the missing parts of her eyebrows. And she does get better at it over time – it takes her less than sixty seconds to draw them on flawlessly, rather than thirty minutes or more.

_It_ doesn’t get better though. Her habit. She pulls her eyebrows out entirely over the next few weeks, several times over. Her skin becomes desensitized to the pain, and there’s a peculiar satisfaction that comes with pulling a hair out in its entirety – almost like some chemical response in her body, and she just can’t get enough. And it’s horrible, it’s disgusting, there is _nothing_ remotely okay about it, but she can’t stop.

Maryse knows exactly what’s going on, but she's completely stopped asking. She ignores it. Maybe she doesn’t care.

The only saving grace to Izzy is that the eyebrow pulling seems to have replaced snapping the hair on her scalp. Her hair starts getting long and gloriously thick again – slowly but steadily reaching its former luster.

She wishes she had short hair again and real eyebrows. That her _issues_ were again less noticeable, anywhere but on her face.

Regardless, Izzy does get used to it over time. She can look in the mirror and somewhat like how she looks, even with the fake eyebrows. She starts paying more attention to how she dresses and presents herself. Others certainly like her new appearance, too – boys and girls alike. In fact, she gets more compliments than ever before. Funny how that works.

Izzy tries to explain _it_ to one of her friends one time. Tries to explain what it’s like, how she can’t control it, how she knows it’s gross but please, _please_ don’t judge her for it.

Jacqulyn laughs and says, “I wouldn’t even have noticed if you hadn’t told me. You look _amazing,_ and, if anything, you look _better_ with the makeup. Your eyebrows were kind of weird-looking before, no offense. Come on, Izzy, lighten up; maybe this is a good thing.”

Jacqulyn is just trying to be nice, trying to find the positive in the situation; she doesn’t mean any harm by it. She doesn’t understand what it’s like.

Izzy smiles hollowly and doesn’t argue.

Izzy is nineteen, and she and Clary are wandering around the gardens at the Institute, sharing childhood memories and cringing at their own past mishaps, telling tales of the people they’ve met and the people they want to. Izzy hasn’t laughed so genuinely in a long time; it feels like there’s always been something weighing down on her shoulders. But not with Clary. With Clary, it’s like they’re both just mundanes, all of the expectations of the Shadow World chased away in an instant.

They’re just chatting, and then Clary recounts a story that stops Izzy short.

“There was this girl, back in freshman year,” Clary says. “Leila. . . . Winters? Waters? Whittingham? Something like that. Anyway, one day she came to school and this whole patch of her hair was gone. It was all bare skin with scabs all over. I mean, it looked seriously awful. Everyone kinda bullied her, and they mimed tearing their hair out, and throwing up, and all that. She was crying so much that the teacher called her mom to come pick her up.”

Izzy stares at her. She swallows, and asks in a carefully even tone, “What was wrong with her?”

“Nothing!” Clary says, with surprising vehemence.

Then she grins sheepishly. “I mean, kind of, but not the way you mean it. It’s okay. I know there’s a lot of mental health stigma in the Shadow World, but in our world it’s more accepted, or at the very least acknowledged. So, anyway, after she sent Leila home, the teacher gave the bullies detention, and then she explained to the whole class what'd happened.”

Izzy waves her hand impatiently when Clary doesn’t continue. “And?”

“Leila had – still has, I guess – a disorder called trichotillomania. Makes her pull her hair, and she can’t really control it. I don’t remember much else, but I think the way the teacher phrased it is that Leila’s mind is sick, just the same as someone’s body gets sick.”

“Did she get better?” Izzy asks breathlessly. Hopefully.

Clary shrugs. “I don’t know. I don’t know if she ever can get better, not completely, but she went to therapy and I think that helped her some. When she came back to school a couple weeks later, she seemed more at peace with it, anyway.”

Izzy bites her lip, trying to hold back the tears stinging in her eyes.

She doesn’t ask anything else, and the topic changes soon, but that’s alright. She has a lot to think about anyway.

“I want to see a mundane therapist,” Izzy tells her mother that night.

Maryse looks surprised. “Why in the world would you—”

“Let me rephrase. I’m _going_ to see a mundane therapist, because I’m nineteen and capable of making these decisions for myself, and you can’t stop me. Not without making a fuss that people will hear about, and that’ll tarnish the family name. Or whatever it is you care about.”

She raises her hand when her mother tries to talk again. “No. Let me finish. You know what? There’s nothing wrong with me. This hair pulling, it’s a sickness, and my whole life you’ve been treating it like some sort of bad habit that I’ve just been doing to make trouble, like I can stop it at any moment. And it’s made me feel like a crazy person – no, like _less_ than a person. Like I was just some kind of sick animal, to be put in a cage in a storeroom somewhere and forgotten as much as possible. And I owe it to myself to prove that wrong, because I have tried so hard and _I deserve better._"

Maryse’s expression is hard to read, but it might be regret.

“Isabelle. . . .” she shakes her head, and her eyes are a bit watery. “I’m so sorry. I never meant to make you feel that way.”

“I know you didn’t,” Izzy says quietly. “But you did.”

“How can I—”

Izzy smiles faintly, and the tears she’s been holding back finally start to fall. “You’re learning. Just the same as I am. You know now, and you can do better. Okay?”

They’re both crying, then. It hurts, and it probably won’t stop hurting for a long time, but it’s a step in the right direction.

**Author's Note:**

> title is from "Mansion" by NF and Fleurie.


End file.
